


Witchcraft and Whatnot

by Tht0neGal666



Category: Naruto
Genre: Abstract, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anyway sorry real tags time, Babysitting, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, I'm gonna stop here or else I might just not stop lol, I'm literally seething I'm so mad that Hanabi & Tenten isn't a tag, Magic, Non-Linear Narrative, PoV tenten, Supernatural - Freeform, Tenten (Naruto)-centric, Training, Vague, Witch - Freeform, Witchcraft, it might be kind of creepy?, kind of? Hanabi can't utilize it but she can teach it to her nephew and or niece that can, like this fic was supposed to have more team gai but instead I said Hanabi rights, neji doesn't die but it's touched on, passing on the torch, same thing with a hyuga lbr, um. I'm honestly not sure how to tag this to make it both appealing and not spoilery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-22
Updated: 2020-05-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:28:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24325786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tht0neGal666/pseuds/Tht0neGal666
Summary: "...Tenten-san." The girl yawned, stretching, and then frowned. "I'm not sore."Neji's eyes snapped to hers, and Tenten giggled."Of course you aren't, kid. I told you that Neji would kill me if I hurt a single hair on your dainty head.""You aren't an Iryou-nin. You have too much chakra for it." The girl said slowly, as if Tenten was daft. Tenten nodded, but offered no explanation.
Relationships: (or at least you can read it like that lol), Hyuuga Hanabi & Tenten, Hyuuga Neji & Rock Lee & Tenten, Hyuuga Neji & Tenten, Hyuuga Neji/Tenten
Comments: 4
Kudos: 36
Collections: Exchange no Jutsu 2020





	Witchcraft and Whatnot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Clementive](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementive/gifts).



> =) happy exchange-no-jutsu! Um, this kinda really ran away from me lol. You mentioned in your 'wants' that you wanted it to be abstract, and one of your prompts mentioned a witch. um, I touch on a lot that you asked for? But I also forgot a lot of things. Either way, I hope you enjoy!
> 
> Also, like, if this is too abstract or doesn't make sense, feel free to ask about it in the comments and I'll answer when authors are revealed!

"Why do you keep your hair up like that? Are you really so weak that you'd let an enemy get a hold of it?" The little girl asked, glaring up at her, and Tenten carefully reminded herself that Neji never asked for _anything_ , and she refused to not come through the _one_ time he needed her to babysit his spoiled cousin.

It only kind of worked.

"Sometimes, people that have don't have a lot are stingy little magpies. They keep _everything_ , no matter what. I grew my own hair thank you very much, no one else can have it." She tried to explain, but it was hard. How did she explain something like this to a eleven year old that was basically village royalty?

How did she explain that there was something deep and gnawing in her gut, something that hissed when she so much as threw a kunai and failed to retrieve it. Something born out of years spent alone, clawing her way to the top. Something born out of too much time spent in the forest.

"That's foolish." Hanabi's voice returned after a moment of consideration. "It makes no _sense._ Why would anyone want your _hair?_ You don't even have a clan to be held ransom against. Hair dresser's don't _steal_ your hair, they dispose of it."

"Hm." Tenten shrugged. "You'd be surprised, Hyuuga-hime. People find ways to make seemingly-worthless things worth something all the time."

"Like Konohamaru."

"Sure." Tenten sighed. "Is there a reason you asked?"

"I...." The girl scowled, glaring up at her and.... _blushing?_ "I May have liked the way it looked. A little. So I wanted to make sure following your example wouldn't be a show of weakness."

"You're _eleven_. You're entitled to a little weakness every now and then." She rolled her eyes, because she got the impression she didn't hear it anywhere near enough. 

The girl harrumphed and looked away, going back to throwing kunai, and Tenten made a decision.

And her hands _didn't_ shake as she lifted them to undo her hair.

\--

Tenten is seven years old, and has just learned a handful of life changing facts.

1\. Her parents had _no_ training. She knew this before, technically, but never really _got_ it before.

2\. Somehow, corpses smell worse then they look.

3\. Deer are, apparently, absolutely _terrifying._

4\. Very few animals can climb. Few dangerous ones, at least.

5\. There is _something_ in the forest.

\--

"Tenten! Tenten!" Lee half called and half coughed, running over to her. She nodded at him as best as she could, but stuck under such a large boulder it wasn't very well at all.

"If you step on my hair." She says, with all the care of someone far too used to rationing their breathing, "Then I will rip out at least three of your teeth."

"A- Of course! I would never do such a thing to a treasured teammate in any case!" Lee assured, squatting down and gathering her sprawled hair back together. It would work better with some sort of tie. "You know, Tenten, you certainly look very different without your hair up! Not- Not _bad_ of course, but different! And...Familiar?..." 

"Of course I look 'familiar'." Tenten snorted. "I'm a girl with long brown hair, brown eyes, and no clan traits. I look like _any_ random citizen off the streets of Konoha." She said matter of factly. Lee looked a little bit like he wanted to argue, but he was too busy lifting up the boulder off of her.

"...Tenten?" Another voice called from further away, and then much closer. Her teammates were _fast_ , if nothing else. "Are you injured?" Neji asked, lifting a green palm readily. 

Part of her hissed at her about knowing better then to accept help, hissed about her being able to do _anything_ herself, but it was a part of her that she had grown used to ignoring. If she couldn't trust her team, then who could she trust?

 _No one._ It asserted firmly, as always, and, see, that's why she ignored it. Cause it was dumb.

"I'm not sure. Everything hurts. I'm pretty sure I'm not immobile?" She offered, standing and stretching to test the statement. She winced once or twice and carefully relocated an elbow and a wrist, but otherwise she was mostly fine.

Neji tsked and laid a hand on her back anyway, and she was flooded with the familiar feeling of Iryo-ninjutsu. She kind of wanted to protest- they were still on their way back from a mission, Neji shouldn't be wasting Chakra like this- but she got distracted when Lee started gathering her _extremely_ booby-trip-tagged equipment with possibly-faulty seals after the fall. By the time she was sure Lee wasn't going to _kill himself_ in an act of friendship, Neji had already stepped away and she was _just_ numb enough to be mostly relieved of pain without it making her a liability if they entered combat again. She was begrudgingly thankful, because he back hurt like a _bitch_.

Lee handed Tenten her equipment, and like clockwork Neji turned on him, checking for Genjutsu (because with Kiri-nin you could never be too careful) and injuries, and she took the time to retrieve spare redo her hair before she started to get jittery about it.

Except she couldn't. Except her fingers were numb, and her wrists were injured, and she had the hand dexterity of a drunk monkey and she _couldn't do her hair._

"Do you...need some help with that?" One of her teammates asked after she gave a particularly loud growl of annoyance after her fourth attempt or so. 

She wanted to _snap_ at them that _no, they can't help they can't touch her hair they can't-_

But. If she couldn't trust her teammates, who could she trust?

 _No one._ Her head insisted again, and it rang a little bit truer, but she still ignored it.

"Do you know how to do it?" She asked instead.

"I'm sure I could figure it out?" Lee tried.

"I could braid it up. It would be better then nothing." Neji offered, and she kind of wanted to stab them both, but instead she nodded.

"Be quick about it."

\--

Tenten slowly comes to the realization that she was hopelessly lost. She thought she knew the woods like the back of her hand, and maybe she did to an extent- but not here. There was _something_ in the forest, and it whispered, it coaxed her away from the forest she was familiar with, deeper and deeper into its maw. 

(there was something in the forest, and it was _hungry.)_

But Tenten is seven years arrogant, and she's certain that she can retrace her steps once she sates her curiosity. So she follows the whispers.

She only realizes how long it's been when she sees a lake and her knees go _weak_ as she realizes how dehydrated she is.

She braces herself as she falls out of the tree, and touches ground for the first time in however-long-it-had-been as she crawls to the pond.and drinks from it.

Eventually, she pulls back and throws up, too young to know that you had to drink in moderation after dehydration. She feels woozy, but manages to scarf down some nearby berries before she passes out. 

The whispers stop whispering, for just a minute, and start _giggling._ She barely even notices, as she gently falls asleep.

(If asked, she'd laugh and call it pure dumb luck that she survived. Only she would ever know it was anything but.)

When she woke up in the twinkling hours of twilight, there was a house in the middle of the river that she hadn't noticed before. She'd never quite learn if it was there before she passed out or not. 

\--

"I'll make you a deal, Hyuuga-hime." Tenten offered a minute later, hair down and looking up at the sky. Neji said he'd pick the girl up at sunrise. It was an hour or two away from sunset.

"Oh?" The girl drawled, turning around with a single cocked eyebrow, and stiffened and narrowed her eyes when she saw Tenten. "What are you playing at?"

"If you touch my hair before sunset," Tenten offers, running a hand through the frankly-absurdly long locks that ended just below her knees, "Then I'll let you cut it _and_ tell you exactly how to make it matter."

"...and if I don't?" Hanabi asks cautiously, childish curiosity fighting clan-heir paranoia. Tenten smiled, half invitation and half challenge.

"Then you let me do your hair for your first seven missions."

"...Five missions." Hanabi objected, and Tenten nodded.

"Sure. Five missions."

It takes several minutes. It may have taken longer, but Hanabi _is_ the genius she thinks she is, at least a little, so she recognizes that the faster she agrees the more time she has.

So the girl nods, familiar determined glint in her eye unique to children that want to know something, and darts forward.

The whispers are too far away to hear, but Tenten knows them well enough that their _coos_ echos in her ears anyway.

\--

"Who are you? Why were you singing?" Tenten scrunches up her nose, staring at the strange woman in the doorway. Tenten could see _through_ her, as if she was made of colored glass. Her eyes shifted through colors- every shade of purple and red and brown she could imagine, and a few more for good measure- and her skin was much the same in skintoned colors, but her hair was gathered on her head in two buns and _never_ changed from is bright, burning, flamed bloody red hair.

The woman giggled. "Oh, don't worry about that. We're just keeping our memory fresh, Da." She smiled. Her hair waved with a breeze that didn't blow. "More importantly, though, what's a hatchling like you doing here? You're positively drenched!"

Tenten scowled at the reminder. It wasn't _her_ fault that the lady had a house in the middle of a lake! 

And, after- days?- by herself, it wasn't her fault that she was desperate enough to swim.

The whispers hadn't spoken since she saw the house, and she couldn't help but notice that the woman sounded a lot like them. It was a pretty good guess, if Tenten did say so herself, and if she'd been led to be so lost in a forest she thought was safe, lost enough she might never make it home, then the least she could do was press for answers.

"You brought me here, didn't you?"

\--

_He's supposed to be dead._

It's something she knows, in her heart of hearts. It tears her up inside, makes her want to wail and scream and fight god herself, because he's _supposed to be dead_ , but what kind of world would that be?

And, somehow, there's a sentiment just as true, and somehow it's even worse.

_I'm supposed to let him die._

She knows it. She's maybe the only one who knows it. Time works- time works weird for her, and she knows more about it then she should.

Time works different for the dead, and she wasn't, quite, but she was close enough that it applied.

She was close enough because death works weird for her too, and she's supposed to be killed twice over by now at _least_ but-

But time and death have one thing in common, and it's that they like being _right_. They like knowing exactly where something is going, because they say it's so. They don't like interloopers- they don't like _her._

She's only alive on good faith, she knows, and a debt they both owe but can never fufill. She's alive because she knows, better then anyone, _exactly_ how wrong it can go when you defy death and time, and they don't like her but they respect her.

So she's supposed to be dead, but she isn't. And Neji's supposed to be dead, so he will be-

So he will be _-_

So he _will be-_

_So he will be-_

\--

"We did, Da. In a way."

"Who- why? Who are you?" 

"Oh, many reasons. First we recognized you- no more then a drop of blood, but far more then enough. At first we just wanted to speak to you, but then the whispers heard whispers, and we decided to keep you safe instead."

"What? What are you- what does that _mean?"_

"It means, hatchling, that you're a legacy in two ways that will get you killed. In two ways we won't let it."

"...Why aren't you telling me who you are?"

"Because you are too young to understand, Da."

"Try me!"

"In the simplest terms, we are the the ghosts of Konoha's past. And, when all is said and done, we will be the martyrs of it's future."

"Those are the _simplest terms?"_

"Da."

\--

"How...how do you move like that?" Hanabi asks, as the last drops of sunlight kiss her head and disappear. Tenten smiles, sitting in a nearby tree. Well, now nearby- it had been nearly a mile away when they started, but Hanabi was _fast_ and _mean_ if nothing else. 

Not that Tenten minded. She was the same, really, just....in the opposite direction. Born of desperation rather then superiority.

"With my feet." Tenten said, and Hanabi probably would have attacked her if the girl wasn't busy pretending not to be nearly as tired as she obviously was. 

"No." The girl snapped. "No, your _chakra_. How does it move like that. All...flickery. Like it wasn't always there."

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you." Tenten almost laughed, because it was true. Hanabi glared at her, eyes glowing a little in the dark, and Tenten stuck her tongue out.

"Don't patronize me." the girl all but _growled_ , and Tenten _did_ laugh, because she sounded _exactly_ like Neji.

"I can't, I'm a matron." She corrected pedantically.

"That- what?"

"Aw, can you not hear me anymore Hyuga-Hime? Wow, I guess that tuckered you out more then I thought it would. C'mon, lets get you to bed. Neji will _kick my ass_ if I hurt a dainty hair on your head."

"I am _not_ dainty, like- like some civilian flower!" The girl sputtered, kicking out as Tenten picked her up.

"Are you _whining?_ Jeez, this is worse then I thought!" Tenten faux-gasped, walking through foliage to return to the village.

Mostly against her will, the girl fell asleep in Tenten's arms on the way back, to the sound of her guffawing laughter.

\--

Tenten wakes up in a bed that smells like sand and salt and ink.

"How long have I been here?" She asks, because she knows the woman can hear her, somehow. She's slept in this bed several times, and the sun hasn't set once. She's always cold, even under the covers, even though it was summer when she went hunting with her parents, and she never hears any animals even though they're in the _forest_. 

"We aren't quite sure. Somewhere between a few hours and a few months." The whispers rang out, even though Tenten couldn't see the woman. 

"How long until I leave?" she asks, and the whispers giggle again. 

"Somewhere between a few hours and a few months."

"For someone who wants to help me, you don't say or do _anything_ helpful." Tenten whines. 

The whispers go silent for a moment, as they always do when the woman herself appears. This time, she is holding something.

It's- it's a mirror. Tenten realizes suddenly that she hasn't seen a mirror since she left home. She grabs for it, and the woman shakes her head and pulls it back. Tenten pouts and sits on her hands so they don't reach out again, and the woman smiles and turns the mirror towards her.

The first thing she notices is how long her hair is. It's twice as long as it was before, and a little bit darker, like wet dirt. She smiles at it, running her fingers through the tangled mop. The second thing she notices is-

"Those aren't my eyes." She whispers, staring into the mirror and watching her own face pale, smile falling to the ground like a glass dish.

"They are now." The woman corrected, with something that almost sounded like pity. 

_"Where are my eyes?"_ She asked, watching tears gather. Her vision goes blurry and, when she looks at them like this, she can almost convince herself that nothing's wrong.

"In your head." the woman shrugged, turning the mirror away again.

Tenten wailed, and the woman cooed at her and calmed her down, and more then ever she wanted her mama and papa.

"Give them back!" She screamed, over and over again, and the woman sighed.

"You don't understand, hatching. You're the only one who thinks they're yours, and it's best to stay that way. We're _helping_ you."

"Give them BACK!" She continued, only getting louder. Her not-her-eyes _burned_ with something that was trying to be there but wasn't and she wanted to claw them out.

"One day, hatching. When you understand why we took them, you can have them back."

"Then tell me why you took them!"

Instead of the woman answering, the whispers returned. Tenten screamed and cried and wailed and raged, she broke things and tried to leave and always always _always_ woke up in the same bed, house undisturbed.

The woman didn't appear again until she stopped, but the whispers only got louder.

\--

_except fuck that._

Except when had she fucking _ever_ listened to time or death or god or even the _whispers?_ Since when does she take orders from anyone but Lady Tsunade or Gai-Sensei, the only bitches she respects?

Sometimes- sometimes the whispers make things happen, and death and time let them because they owe the whispers a lot. And, usually, the thing that happens is that the whispers are giving Naruto leeway to do whatever the hell he wants.

She wonders what would happen if he knew. If he knew that he was supposed to be deader then _her_ , but the whispers loved him- or needed him- or both- too much. Wondered if the red haired girl that she watched adore Sasuke from afar knew it either, or even the sand siblings that one time. 

The whispers weren't with her on this one, though. The whispers didn't give two shits about her teammates; the whispers _hated_ that she _dared_ to trust them when they taught her better then that.

But Tenten didn't give two fucks what the whispers wanted. What mattered was what she knew- and she knew how to fix this. She knew how to stop this.

She knew she was supposed to let it happen.

She knew she wasn't going to.

\--

"You owe me your soul." Tenten says when Neji comes to pick up the girl at sunrise. He sighs with the force of a dozen winds.

"You already have it." He said blandly, not even looking at her.

"Semantics." She rolled her eyes. She nudges the girl awake, because academy student or not she was the H _yuga heiress_ and Tenten did _not_ want to see what would happen if she tried to pick the girl up in her sleep.

"...Tenten-san." The girl yawned, stretching, and then frowned. "I'm not sore."

Neji's eyes snapped to hers, and Tenten giggled.

"Of course you aren't, kid. I told you that Neji would _kill me_ if I hurt a single hair on your dainty head."

"You aren't an Iryou-nin. You have too much chakra for it." The girl said slowly, as if Tenten was daft. Tenten nodded, but offered no explanation.

"Your father wanted you returned for training." Neji remind the almost-Genin, before she could keep pressing Tenten. Tenten smirked, and waved them goodbye.

"Feel free to tell me the next time Hyuga-hime needs a babysitter!" She called, and got two scowls for her trouble.

Sometimes, it was the little things in life.

\--

Just once, Tenten plays by the woman's rules. 

She stops trying to escape, and the woman comes back. She spends countless hours in the house, learning seals and secrets and names and a million other things she _definitely_ shouldn't know. She learns that villages never die, that grudges can be held after death, that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. 

She learns that there's more like her- well, kind of. No one else has visited the house, but they're out there. They hear the whispers. They are owed reparations by the universe.

Mostly, she learns that when an entire village is slaughtered and drowned and razed to the ground, on the whim of an _accident_ , then there's a _whole lot_ of reaction to compensate for that action.

Tenten emerges from the woods a wise woman of a seven year old, and no one has seen her in two months. She chooses to believe that that was how long she was gone. She's shipped to a civilian orphanage and starts her next year at the academy nary a week later, and almost convinces herself that the house and the lake and the woman and the _whispers_ were a delusion.

\--

They almost talk about it, once.

"I'm supposed to be dead." 

"No you aren't."

"Yes, I am, what did you-"

_"No, you aren't."_

It's never brought up again. Not really.

\--

Tenten goes missing pretty much whenever no one's looking at her, but people don't notice. They aren't often looking at her.

At the academy, she learns how to be a Shinobi. And, at the hut, she learns everything else. She falls asleep in the Hut's bed, and wakes up in the orphanage. She excels in seals and history and escape artistry and weapons fighting, and doesn't care enough to note her grades elsewhere. 

Tenten always, _always_ wears her hair up. She has, on occasion, let other girls pick her clothes or do her make up, and they have, on occasion, tried to do her hair as well and gotten a senbon stuck between their thumb and index finger. They stop trying to play with her after that, but it's okay, because they don't touch her hair either.

Rumors spread, as they are prone to do, and there is word of a witch in the woods.

Only children take it seriously, but that's okay- she only appears for children anyway. She's even as short as one, and her knee-length dirt brown hair covers her eyes, and she speaks in a dialect none of them really recognize, and she can grant wishes.

You ask her for something, and she giggles about an unrepayable debt, and the universe shifts a little as, inch by inch, it makes it up to the girl. 

Sometimes, children get curious, and curious children ask questions. The witch answers them.

\--

"Who are you?"

"An Unclaimed legacy."

 _"What_ are you?"

"Bored. Bored and hungry."

"Hungry for what?"

"Recognition."

"Then why don't you appear for more important people?"

"They can solve their own problems. Kids have to look out for each other, right?"

"Wait- what? How old are you?"

"I think I'm 12. Time's weird."

"Who owes you a debt?"

"Death, mostly."

"What? What are you- what does that _mean?"_

"I think it means Death would make a terrible shinobi. It's too much of an open book.

"Argh- Why do you never give answers that make any _sense?"_

"They do."

"Why do you grant wishes by making kids eat your _hair?"_

"Because the universe doesn't owe you anything, but it owes me something. And if you eat my hair, you're _just_ enough of me to squeeze a wish out. What, would you rather I kiss you?"

"N-no! I don't even know who you are!"

"Oh, that's not a problem. You will."

\--

When Hanabi is 14 years old, she touches Tenten-san's hair. She'll never be able to tell for sure if Tenten-san let her or not.

When Hanabi is 14 years old, Tenten-san smiles and offers her a wish. But she is 14 years arrogant, and all she wants is to be the best possible version of herself.

So she wishes to know all of Tenten's secrets, and the girl who might as well be her cousin led her to the forest.

No one saw either of them for two months.

**Author's Note:**

> ok as a treat! It took me a second to decide what to do, so I've got little snippets you can have as a treat since I'm almost certainly going to do nothing with them! ^-^  
> \--(Immortal Team Taka)--  
> (exchange no jutsu idea; team Taka as various immortal beings (Suigetsu and his brother are Selkies, Karin is a vampire, Sasuke is a vampire hunter cursed with immortality, Juugo is a werewolf (Naruto is an Uzumaki witch and Sakura is a ghost but this isn't about them)) that catch wind of the grand opening of some museum, and find a lot of important shit that they've been looking for forever is on display. So, obviously, they rob the place.)  
> "Ok. Ok. Run me through this one more time. You've been looking for this scarf for 230 years-"  
> "320 years."   
> "-320 years. and you found it. In a museum. Which you now want me to rob for you."  
> "Is it really robbery if it's mine to begin with?"  
> "You haven't touched it for 320 years, it's basically public property!"  
> "It's basically fuck you, my brother made me that scarf!"  
> "Your brother lives in LA! I visited him a decade ago! Ask him for another one!"  
> "He can't make another one! It's been 320 years, you think he remembers how to use a loom?"  
> \--  
>  "If you keep fucking with me when I'm shifted then eventually I'm going to bite your nose off, and I don't think I'll even feel sorry." Juugo says matter of factly, yawning awake to the sound of snickers and recorded barking.  
> "We weren't fucking with you- we were playing with you." Karin protested. "And Sasuke-kun was recording it. For prosperity. And because Kabuto payed us."  
> "For the record, I was fucking with you." Suigetsu assured. Sasuke grunted.


End file.
